Startup Weekend Chandler: Day One

At 2pm today, I attended the Startup 101 Workshop


This intensive 3-hour workshop provides the basics of building a business, from choosing a team to market research and completing Version 1.0 of your product.

This gave me a better idea of what to expect over the weekend. I have to admit that the closer the time came to pitching, I became extremely nervous. Your 60-second pitch had include an intro, the problem you're trying to solve, the solution and what you needed (web developers, designers, etc). I'd written it out a couple of days before and it looked a little something like this:

Hi, I'm Celise Colston and I'm a Young Adult Fiction author. The problem is that I'm seeing a number of public schools cutting their arts programs to narrow to focus on curriculum standardization to improve test scores. In 2009, AIMS testing results indicated that only 72% of students passed the writing portion. I want to change that statistic. My nonprofit, The Write Zone, will be a writing and publishing organization. My vision is to assist local students ages 13-18 with their writing skills through drop-in tutoring, workshops, publishing and in-school programs. I also want to help teachers foster an appreciation for the literary arts in their classrooms. The thing is, I don't know if my idea is feasible. So this weekend I'm hoping to connect with a research savvy person--or people--to help me come up with a community needs assessment.

My intention was to memorize that whole thing and then get up on that little stage and blow it out. Yeah, not so much.

28 other people pitched and while only a few did it without cheat sheets, the majority them used cheat sheets. So I used mine. Even using my little cheat sheet I was shaking by the time I got off that little stage. An hour or two beforehand, my husband had sent me this wonderful text:

Jerry Lewis once said its good to be nervous because it means you'll be creative.

And then he text me a picture of our cat rolling around on the floor, giving him the Crazy Eye. LOL. I looked at that before I pitched and it made me smile.

So, as I mentioned, 28 people voted, and as you pitched, there was a person near the stage typing up your idea. After you pitched, your idea was printed out and tacked to a board. Then you had to take 3 sticky notes and vote for your favorite 3. After they put the ideas up and people started walking through, I had two people come up and tell me that my idea wasn't up there!

I panicked but didn't show it as I walked through myself just to see and they were right! By that time, a lot of the other ideas had several sticky notes underneath them and nobody was going to vote for my mine because they'd be all done. But the person in charge was told, she apologized, hand wrote the idea, slapped it up there and made a loud announcement.

Within seconds I had 4 votes. 5 if you include my own. LOL.

When the voting ended, if you had less than 5 votes, your idea was cut and you'd have to find another team to join.

I got lucky.

Say hello to our 14 Startup Weekend Chandler companies:

Charitivize – Help good nonprofits create fundraising campaigns and identify potential contributors

Chow Locally – Connect local food vendors with local farms to bridge the gap, helping citizens eat locally

Surprises – Mobile app to find local freebies on your birthday

RhinoDough – Free 401K advisory site geared toward the younger generation

E-Intro - Social email that personalizes connections through a series of customizable templates

iPatient – Consumer healthcare solution look to build a mobile app

Armored.IO

Donor Assure – Mobile app for blood donors to check CRM

The Write Zone – Nonprofit writing center for teens geared towards self-publishing We're not geared towards self-publishing, that's just going to be one of the main programs. It's  all about the writing here.


Class Project – Help companies tell stories through user-submitted artifacts

Nuke It – iPhone games using physics

Card Jolt – Convert business cards into audio-visual commercial

Alertosaurus – Authority Labs new project

I Crashed – Crash sensor combined with tracking software to create an ‘OnStar’ type response for endurance athletes (bikers, distance runners, etc)
Is it bad to admit that out of all the ideas, I was only really interested in one, not including my own?

Steve didn't pitch. He came to be part of a group.He's the business guy. But his wife's a teacher, so he can give us that perspective.

Daanon, Marvin and I are the "creative souls" in the group. We have writing and or publishing experience.

Katie is the Dir of Operations at Gangplank and is our floater with the marketing advice. She's not an active part of the group (because she has to run the thing), but she's an official member of the group.

I really can't believe how fast we gelled. Steve is the business guy. He's the guy that's going to right it all down so that it all makes sense. What was interesting is that even though it's my idea and "this is the way I want my business to look", Steve asked Daanon and Marvin "Okay, you're the CEO of The Write Zone. What's your vision of how this company should work?"

And what happened is we were all saying the same thing, but in a different way. It was such an amazing feeling that I got chills. I know why I want to start this nonprofit, but it was interesting to hear what others had to say:

Daanon:

~ Physical location
~ Writing camp
~ Learn about storytelling
~ Offering editing services
~ Creativity over structure
~ Teaching the craft of writing
~ Chance to meet and work with published authors and professional writers
~ Know that they can make money being a writer
~ Teach the mechanics of publishing a book
~ Participants coming back to mentor other participants or facilitating a workshop.
~ Measure of success is coming in and creating something, creating that writing spark, and having a publishing company of just teen authors.
~ Provide scholarships

Marvin:

~ Youth empowerment as a form of expression
~ Teaching social community skills
~ Write what you feel
~ Express as collaboration
~ Writing to create a community
~ Create a safety zone
~ Not about achievement, just expression
~ Interact w/ adults
~ Be able to read in a safe, non-judgmental environment

I got a little teary-eyed writing that. LOL. It's how I see my company impacting the community and it was inspiring to know that there are others out there who see it the same way.

Our group gelled liked that so quickly, it was great. By the end of the night, we had come up with a Starter Mission Statement.
Tomorrow, we're hoping to pull together an impromptu writing workshop at the location at 3pm. Crossing my fingers that we'll get some participants.

Stay tuned for Day 2